Y: people don’t need to lower their expectations. That is ridiculous. The rich are rigging the system. Education and hard work should at least lead to a job where you can support yourself.
Y: people don’t need to lower their expectations. That is ridiculous. The rich are rigging the system. Education and hard work should at least lead to a job where you can support yourself.
It's not just the rich. It's you and me buying cheap goods from China, pumping up their economy, and expecting we should have a much better lifestyle than they do. It's American exceptionalism and it can't last. What goes up must come down. If you believe standards of living have to continually rise you're using the logic of a pyramid scheme, but the rest of the world is onto the scheme.
Societies without a middle class do not fare well. Eventually people revolt. It is not reasonable for most of the country to be poor while a few at the top have all the wealth.
When the average worker has a higher income, he tends to spend more, which helps perpetuate a healthy economy. Trickle-down economics hasn't worked yet, but I guess there's always hope.
Speaking of immigrants, I came across the following article: https://reason.com/blog/2017/06/07/i...-for-substantiv
Which pretty clearly shows that immigrants as a group are a decided plus for the economy, initiating startups at a blazing rate, and contributing to much of the economic growth we experience. That would really chap the xenophobes' hide, if they read much.
Germany has a solid manufacturing base with lots of decent paying jobs that come with that. A decent standard of living for most people can be done, just not as long as people like the Kochs pull the strings of their little puppets like Paul Ryan. And not as long as Republicans continue their decades long efforts to destroy collective bargaining.
I see Gravity Payments is still doing well; that's the Seattle-based corporation whose CEO took the bold step of raising employee compensations:
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/...131986394.html
Germany has had ups and downs. Remember when they suffered from hyperinflation and Deutsch marks were used as kindling? When a suitcase was stolen but the money in it dumped on the curb?
And the Germans weren't prepared for this downturn. They too had rising expectations. When those weren't met they turned to fascism.
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